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The law firm of Victor Alexander, Jr. P.C., has been successfully representing Georgians suffering a loss of quality of life due to an accident or injury for more than three decades. Let us help you obtain the medical and income benefits you need for your Workers’ Compensation or Personal Injury claim.

Archive for February, 2015

In MARTA v. REID, S13G1812 (Supreme Court of Georgia, September 22, 2014), twelve of the 32 payments the employee received before returning to work were untimely, and he was owed a 15% late-payment penalty pursuant to OCGA §34-9-221(e). But he waited 8 years to make a claim for the penalties which were not paid when due. The ALJ, Appellate Division and Superior Court agreed with the employer that the employee’s claim was a “change in condition” claim under OCGA §34-9-104, and therefore time-barred under the two-year limitation period. The Court of Appeals reversed, finding that the applicable statute of limitations was OCGA §34-9-82, and since the original claim for benefits was timely under that statute, the penalty claim was also timely.

Not so, says the Supreme Court. Under OCGA §34-9-104(a)(1), ‘change in condition’ means a change in the wage-earning capacity, physical condition, or status of an employee. “In the workers’ compensation arena, the term ‘status of an employee’ means the legal condition of an employee in the context of the employer-employee relationship”, said the Court. In this case, the employee’s status was first established when the employer voluntarily began paying benefits, and was last established when the last payment was made. The late payment penalties were additional benefits to which the employee was entitled, but he had to make the claim for them within two years of when they were due.

The court reiterated that, “[E]ven if one has a just claim it is unjust not to put the adversary on notice to defend within the period of limitation and [the] right to be free of stale claims in time comes to prevail over the right to prosecute them.” The real purpose of pursuing these late payments was to overcome the Two year Statute of Limitations. If an employee has not received weekly benefits within two years of the last payment and all penalties have been paid and benefits have been properly suspended by WC-2, then the need for future weekly benefits are prevented by the Employer. In this case the Employee was using the late payments excuse in order to get her weekly benefits restarted beyond the Two years.

You are standing on a ladder at work and feel dizzy. The next thing you know, you are on the ground, your shoulder hurts, and co-workers are asking if you are okay. Is this a work injury? Will your employer pay your medical bills or income benefits if you lose any time?

Idiopathic falls are falls that are caused by a personal condition, like fainting because of low-blood pressure, or having a heart attack or a seizure. You would haven fallen no matter where you were when you had the episode. Your job did not cause the fall. Generally, worker’s compensation benefits are not paid for idiopathic falls. However, if your job places you in a dangerous position (like on ladder) and increases the risk that you will be injured when you have that fall, you may recover benefits for lost time and medical bills. Other examples are falling onto a hot stove or hitting your head on a piece of machinery. See, United States Cas. Co. v. Richardson, 75 Ga.App. 496, 43 S.E.2d 793 (1947).

But you will not get benefits if you have an idiopathic fall and just hit your head on the floor or a baseboard, because there is no distinction between the floor at work and the floor anywhere else—wherever you were when you fell, there would have been a floor. Borden Foods Co. v. Dorsey, 112 Ga.App. 838, 146 S.E.2d 532 (Ga. App., 1965). Prudential Bank v. Moore, 219 Ga.App. 847, 467 S.E.2d 7 (Ga. App., 1996). Your injury must arise out of your employment and “fairly be traced to the employment as a contributing proximate cause… [it must not come] from a hazard to which the workmen would have been equally exposed apart from the employment. The causative danger must be peculiar to the work.” Fried v. United States Fidelity & Guar. Co, 192 Ga. 492, 15 S.E.2d 704 (Ga., 1941). Therefore, the traveling salesman who slipped and fell on a wet street was subjected to the risk by the nature of his job, even though the risk of crossing a wet street was one shared by the public at large. Thornton v. Hartford Accident etc., Co. 198 Ga. 786, 32 S.E.2d 816 (1945). If a wall falls on you at work when a tornado roars through, make a claim if your job required you to be in the building when the tornado hit. Nat. Fire Ins. Co. v. Edwards, 152 Ga. App. 566, 263 S.E.2d 455 (1979). And if you break your leg as you are hurrying down the supermarket aisle where you work as a cashier, and you don’t trip or slip or come into contact with an object, you may still get benefits, although the decision in Johnson v. Publix Supermarkets, 256 Ga. App. 540, 568 S.E.2d 827 (2002) has been severely criticized by subsequent courts.

But even if you can prove that your job put you in danger by requiring you to be where you were “when the peril struck,” known as the ‘positional risk doctrine’, there must still be a causal connection between the injury and the job. So the worker who fell when her knee gave out on her employer’s premises as she was hurrying to clock in was out of luck in Chapparal Boats, Inc. v. Heath, 269 Ga. App. 339, 606 S. E.2d 567 (Ga. App. 2004). Likewise, a nurse who was injured when she stood and turned to get a cup of water for a patient and her knee gave out “was not exposed to any risk unique to her employment by standing and turning” and was not entitled to benefits. St. Joseph’s Hospital v. Ward, 300 Ga. App. 845 (2009). And in Chambers v. Monroe County Board of Commrs., A14A0265 (Ct. App. July 16, 2014), the Court found that an employee who was injured when she stood up from her desk at the direction of her supervisor had an idiopathic fall that did not arise out of her employment. The Court deferred to the findings of fact of the Board, although the ALJ had found the injury compensable.

But in Harris v. Peach County Bd of Commrs., 296 Ga. App. 225 (2009), the Court found that “when a supervisor expressly directs an employee to undertake a specific physical activity, and the employee is then injured while carrying out that very activity, there is a sufficient causal connection between the conditions of employment and the resulting injury to warrant compensation, no matter how mundane the physical activity itself (i.e. walking or standing, etc.) may be.” Clearly in order to have a successful claim for an injury from an idiopathic fall, it is important to connect the activity during which the injury occurred to the specific duties of the job.